Even in Death
by TheTwelfthPeer
Summary: Back to war at last. A dreadnought of the Iron Knights awakens and resumes his immortal duty in the Emperor's name. One-shot.


**Through the cold and the pain, their voices slithered to his battered and ancient ears. The voices wormed into his brain, and his primary heart beat once. Then once again. The cold was bitter and sharp, pins and needles digging their way into what remained of the nerve endings on his torso.** _ **He was still alive.**_ **The voices came through clearly now, through the cold and the pain of limbs lost, and the lids covering empty eye sockets fluttered.** _ **Praise to the Emperor**_ **. It wasn't a thought, or a prayer-it was a reflexive action, done like a child might suckle at its mother's breast. But praise the Emperor he would, with the roar of bolter fire and the crushing of His enemies once more.**

 **They were chanting, and in the chanting he heard praises to the Emperor, to Dorn their genefather, and to him.** _ **Stop,**_ **he wanted to say. He was not worthy of praise. He had merely done his duty, as all good sons of Dorn must. But the chanting was part of a ritual, a ritual awakening. An awakening for him. One nub of an arm waved in his metal womb, trying to catch their attention. It was ignored or went unseen, and so his metal tomb and womb both was taken from the cradle that kept him asleep and alive for the long, long years he had sailed the stars.**

 **They, whoever they were, had voices he did not know, pitches and intonations and timbres that were as unfamiliar to him as his slumber being finished. There would be answers. There always were. But they were yet to come, and the pain was making its way through his skull like a war tank threaded the ruins of a destroyed city. Synapses fired, reawakening atrophied and useless muscles. Where once he had strode the battlefield, commanding Marine and human alike in the defense of humanity, now his legs ended as stumps at the early thigh, and he felt the fire in his spine where it had been broken in his final battle as a Marine.**

 **There were a group of aspirants watching his awakening. As his metal tomb was slowly and carefully connected to the chassis that would let him wage war once again, the audio sensors were first. Now everything came through clearly, including the shuffling and whisper of teenage aspirants unsure of who or what he was, but that he was something or someone to be revered as a relic of the Chapter.** _ **Teenagers,**_ **he thought.** _ **They never change.**_ **He had exulted in molding young men into Marines worthy of the name, as Captain of the Training Company, and he could have counted on his fingers the number of aspirants he'd lost in battle. Before internment in this, his eternal tomb. With gentle, loving care, one of the brother Marines that served the Machine God connected his tomb to the visual sensors on the chassis that would let him walk once again.**

 **He could see. The room was as it always was, and he knew from his own time that it would smell of sacred oils and incense, designed to appease both him and the machine spirit they were connecting him to. His chassis stood on a plinth, raised above the floor, with bright lights shining down onto it. He'd screamed when they'd shown it to him, before his eyes had closed forever and he saw only through the receptors on the outside of the chassis' hull. His metal body was nearly thirteen feet tall, big and blocky. Battle honors adorned it; painted sigils, the mark of his Chapter. They told a story of centuries of service, of combats entered, fought, and won. His was a litany of battle honors, and a litany of victories.**

 **His was a litany of sorrows. The chanting finally ended, and all his systems were up and running. Deep in his heart, he felt a pang of sorrow for his lost limbs, for leading aspirants to war, for helping govern their homeworld. But the homeworld had been lost, he had been interred, and then the homeworld retaken. Now he went to war only, and a poor imitation of the crusades they had undertaken for the defense of humanity and the Imperium. Such was his life. Such was his pain.**

 **His amplified external vox crackled to life when he willed it to, and he thought his words through it. "WHO AWAKENS ME?" The words rumbled through the chamber, booming and echoing.**

" **We call you to war once again, Venerable Ancient Leopold. The Primarch and Him on Terra watch, and know that we Crusade to defend Vaeti Prime against a Waagh of Greenskins, intent on ruining the planet."**

" **WHO, NOT WHY."** **His sensors fed him images. A huddle of aspirants, robed like the older and more experienced sword-brothers of the chapter. One Marine sworn to the Machine God. A Marine carrying the Sword of Friedrich Henrich, the first Chapter Master. Venerable Dreadnought Leopold smiled inside his tomb. So it was to be war, then, and the Chapter Master himself come to awaken him.**

 **They told him who they were, and even the names of the aspirants to the Chapter, they who bore Dorn's geneseed. He quizzed the aspirants on their training, and rumbled his approval at them when they answered his questions promptly and correctly.** ** **"I SUPPOSE TRAINING STANDARDS HAVE NOT SLIPPED TOO BADLY,"**** **he told Karl, the Chapter Master.**

 **Karl inclined his head, and a sudden pang of longing shot through Leopold's twin hearts at his inability to do even that, let alone feel the wind through his hair as he purged with his kin. Chapter Master Karl explained some of the tactical situation; there was a breach in the wall of Vaeti Center, and could Leopold hold the gap for long enough for the entire chapter of the Celestial Lions to arrive and reinforce him. Their expected arrival time was fourteen days from now. Leopold did not mention the vagaries of the Warp that would mean they could arrive fourteen months late.**

 **"** ** **IT WOULD BE MY PLEASURE,"**** **he rumbled. That was what it meant to be a Son of Dorn and an Iron Knight; defend the indefensible and** _ **succeed.**_

 **So he would.**

 **So he did. The first three days, refugees streamed into the city of Vaeti Center, shepherded around his legs by Aspirants serving their initial tour as squires, to learn what combat truly was. He stayed silent, dormant. Waiting. Waiting for the first sounds of combat or battle-chatter over the vox to reach his ears, through the chassis that let him stride a battlefield and the metal womb that sheltered him when he slept amongst the stars. He watched, and catalogued the refugees that patted his chassis for luck. Luck to him, or to them, he did not know and did not ask. He recorded their images and names, and sent them to the Strike Cruiser** _ **Courageous Defiance**_ **.**

 **The fourth day, the refugees stopped. And he began. Conservation of ammo was paramount, and so he fought the orks with fist and his chassis itself, unyielding, chanting praise to the Primarch Progenitor and Him-on-Terra, reciting the lineage of his geneseed, all the way back to Dorn himself. It was a long list. He killed six hundred orks in the time it took. With only his fists. The fifth day there came no orks. Evacuation shuttles started lifting from the spaceport in the city, when a surgical strike from his battle brothers in the Sixth Company reduced the ork anti-air over the planetary sector to rubble. They continued in the sixth day, and on the seventh day he fired his first shots.**

 **Then, his audio receptors heard the patter of little feet. He twisted his metal torso, to see, and he saw. Two refugee children, a boy and a girl, siblings from their hair color, fleeing a small group of Astartes sized orks. He moved from the breach in the wall.** _ **He moved from his station.**_ **The first ork caught a Stormbolter shell to the face. The second was pulped in Leopold's power claws. The rest fell swiftly, and he rumbled at the two children. "RUN FAST, NOW. I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HOLD THEM FOREVER.** "

 **The two tried to run faster, to the breach in the wall, and he cleared it of the orks ahead of them with a burst from his Stormbolters, turning various orks into misted spray. He continued on, even as he spun his torso all the way around, to engage the orks trying to circle around him and catch the children.**

" **FOR THE PRIMARCH AND HIM-ON-TERRA,** " **Leopold broadcasted, and then planted his waddling feet. "IN THEIR NAMES I DEFEND, XENO SCUM.** _ **GLORIA IMPERATOR!**_ " **There would be no retreat, no further running. The children were safely in the city, plucked up by a squad of battle brothers and carried to safety, and here he would stand. Here he would die. It would be** _ **glorious**_ **, and one day, one of the battle brothers that had been made from his gene-seed when he died his first death would be glad to have been borne from Leopold the Defiant.**

 **Vaeti Prime held. Vaeti Center held. A nameless young man bid his sister a tearful goodbye as he was carried away on a landing craft bearing a white cross on a black shield. But he smiled, too, as the Sergeant in charge of the Aspirants looked at him, and nodded once.**

" **Congratulations, Aspirant Leopold. It's a good and honorable name. Bear it well."**


End file.
